even if changes were pulled from that repo, they wouldn't make it into the downstream repo as that file has been near completely replaced, not that it is a change of anything more than a line of text in a readme
Most people do not understand this and think that we can reall talk about nuclear vs solar when we really need to talk about an energy mix where you pick one point (for example you pick nuclear or solar) and the rest depends on this choice.
Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high.
Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).
So you've managed to cherry pick the one study showing nuclear power in any kind of possible light. Typical.
You do know that the study is only applicable to running your off-grid cabin from a sole source and battery storage based on 2020 costs. The study also assumes 100% uptime for nuclear power.
It does not deal with demand shifts, it does not deal with transmission, it does not deal with backup power.
It also managed to finds a nuclear LFSCOE of $106/MWh. Even though it doesn't adapt to peaks or breakdowns when Hinkley Point C sits at $170/MWh when running at full tilt for 35 years.
Whenever we do quality research on the subject the results end up being that nuclear power is horrifically expensive.
See for example:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I'm advocating for an energy mix where the majority of energy is supplied by intermittent renewables with a small amount of low-cost (i.e. not nuclear) dispatchable generation. This avoids the extortionate "last mile" of costs when utilising 100% intermittent renewables.
>Isn’t this a pretty much solved problem though? Just add a battery to your house?
In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also.
I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
So people like me with solar need the other people in the area not to all go for solar, then we will need to find a way to burn the excess. Is the same with a country, we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds. The EU market might be so in demand that the rich countries will bid for the energy and the poor will have to burn their things to survive.
I am wondering if it would happen that with so many solar roofs we will either have to pay for people to use my energy or I will need to actually throw the excess in the ground safely somehow.
> In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also. I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
> we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds
You, personally, can't store 2 weeks of energy (though it's closer than you may expect, 1 person-week of Italian average electrical consumption is ~= 1 EV battery*). But you personally don't have to, transmission to another part of the country (or continent) has a huge impact on how much storage you need.
Basically, this problem is known, it's not all that difficult to work around — everything on the scale of "national power supply" is expensive and has pros and cons, PV isn't particularly remarkable in the scale or cost of those pros and cons even with current solutions and assuming no R&D effort can improve the trade-offs, they're just different than the pros and cons of the other options.
The real life is not as simple as you wish
The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors,
it can't be sent to a different region in the same village
it is a grid limitation.
Also when the weather is bad it is bad in a big chunk of Europe, sure in the South they will probably have nicer weather.
What about the issue when everyone has solar? then who buys my extra production?
Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem
we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
> The real life is not as simple as you wish The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors, it can't be sent to a different region in the same village it is a grid limitation.
I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's.
But to keep it simple, I can say that limits of your grid can be re-engineered, and even for unrelated age and capacity reasons people are already planning to spend more on upgrading the European grid anyway, than it would cost for the material to build a global high-power DC backbone that would let the EU be lit in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, without any batteries at all, by panels in the Australian outback — and I have in fact done the maths on that.
(Only China is actually making enough aluminium, there's geopolitics even before Trump happened, but the price tag to get a single ohm of resistance around the entire planet is actually fine).
> Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
Such investment is still generally worth it, because you don't need to actually sell anything when the price is low (or even negative), and even if it was zero the whole time forever, you've saved 100% of the current cost of supplying yourself with electricity.
> My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
So are you expert in grids?
is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?
About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
I bought the panels because they were subsidized otherwise there would be more profitable to buy the energy, without subsidies and if energy will be cheaper or I would get paid to use it then solar panels would make no sense .
Imagine then a country that needs to over build solar panels, why would private sector accept this?
Interested amateur. I skim read the actual government and industrial reports, and know enough to be able to roughly estimate the effort required to construct precise answers.
> is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?
"Cheap" is already the wrong question: on this scale, energy is measured in percentage points of the economy, opportunity loss from what else can be done with the same resources, geopolitical exposure, not pure €, and that means questions like "is it cheap?" can only be considered against everything else the governments can do with the same resources — not even just other energy projects, absolutely everything, and how everything interacts with everything else, has to be taken into consideration.
If you limit yourself to just €, the scenarios on page 7 say that improving the grid would:
• 2030: reduce wasted power by 2 GW while saving €5 billion per year in wasted energy
• 2040: reduce wasted power by 4.8 GW while saving €9 billion per year in wasted energy
While another pair of options on page 22 shows:
• €5.6 billion per year invested, returns of €9.4 billion per year
• €3.6 billion per year invested, returns of €8.6 billion per year
But! The report is also has a section header titled "Does the study consider the EU’s goal to
reduce dependency on gas imports?" with several specific mentions of Russia throughout.
> About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
I believe Italian electricity (you are in Italy, right?) is slightly cheaper than German electricity, but that's more than compensated for by having more sun.
These nuclear cost arguments always gloss over the fact that nuclear has no insurance or cleanup costs. Developers will only build plants if the government assumes both of those costs.
Add to that the uncertainty over fuel and the disposal of used fuel, and there's literally no valid cost argument for nuclear.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the fiscal realities seem insurmountable.
No they don't. The energy you get from your battery costs 10x as much as directly from the panels, but you only get a fraction of your energy from storage.
I asked Framework that repeatedly, but no progress. I think they might be violating EU Regulation 2018/302, which is rather common, mostly due to ignorance. The problem is that it is rather hard to enforce such regulation to non-EU/EEA companies. You can still send your wishes to support@frame.work.
Update: you can buy from Norway now, but you need to get it shipped to a different country. You need to select a different country and then chose a billing address different from the shipping one. The message that the website displays on not being able to order from Norway is misleading, and it looks like no email to Norwegian customers has been sent with respect to this possibility. Not perfect, but they got better.
Cost != price/value. You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00. The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There are a lot of factors to keep into account, and the cost of electricity production is often a minor one, when considering the total price.
> You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00
Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear.
And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too.
> The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly.
What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars.
> You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas.
Lazard 2024, CAISO scenario: nuclear is cheaper compared to go with renewables + batteries (max 4 hours). It also does not take into account integration costs, such improving network connectivity.
It is quite ironic, because European Nordic countries do not want to build more network because of the crazy electricity spot prices that Germany has because of renewables. I live in Norway and no-one wants to further connect their electricity network to Germany, and the Swedish government blocked the construction of new connections. When Germany needs electricity, people in Oslo start to pay electricity even hundreds of times more, and when Germany has too much power from renewables, the energy price goes below zero, which means that German taxpayers are paying people from other countries to buy their discounted low value electricity, damaging the other producers. It is a terrible system, and it will only get worse without a good base load or accumulators that are not realistic for the foreseeable future.
If Germany had a stable electricity production with renewables+nuclear, it would be beneficial to strength the network, which would indeed be beneficial to renewables.
If there is a place which clearly show how the fight against nuclear caused damaged is Germany: ~700 b€ between investments and subsidies to renewables, has very high emissions in the energy sector, while being dependent on Russian gas (costed ~1500 b€ in the last years) and France export of nuclear energy, high and unstable energy prices, that contributed to an industrial crisis that made France more attractive (where electricity is cheap and stable), while still failing at reaching climate targets.
The alternative would have been to keep the existing reactors open, build new ones, for a grand total of ~36 b€.
Source: doi.org/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642
The belief that renewables+batteries alone are the only solution (even in hard to abate sectors) is not supported by real world data, nor by simulations. IPCC scenarios clearly shows that there is the need of a nuclear+renewable mix to meet the climate targets. The report from JRC recommends the same.
Historically, German citizens have chosen to be reliant on fossil fuels and highly subsidized electricity to not use nuclear energy. I just hope that at Germany will stop blocking nuclear at the EU level if other countries have different opinions on that and rather prefer not to follow the demise of the German energy policy.
Lazard 2023 estimates that solar and wind in the California grid costs 2/3 times more than when just considering the LCOE. Solar and wind production can be cheaper, but the final price is way higher.
When taking into account the "Cost of Firming Intermittency" the total cost can go up by 2/3 times in the "CAISO" case at page 8 of Lazard 2023, which is higher than LCOE for existing nuclear and to some LCOE estimates for new nuclear.
In addition to that, there are additional costs (integration costs) that are not considered in LCOE; for example, you can build PV power plants in sunny places, but that might not be where the electricity need is, so the network should be upgraded as well. All these costs are highly dependent on the penetration of intermittent sources and on the grid, and this is why the price of the electricity can be very different from the cost of electricity. I can produce electricity very cheaply, but maybe no one needs that. This is why Germany sometimes have negative prices, so it actually pays with subsidies the consumption of energy in neighbourhood countries, and then the price can skyrocket, which is why Sweden recently blocked a new connection towards Germany, "where the electricity market today does not function efficiently" (Energy Minister Ebba Busch).
I am sorry to say that I don't understand why solar without battery and solar+battery leads to different cost for firming in the Lazard. Shouldn't solar with battery already be pretty firm?
Remember we primarily want to reduce carbon emissions and we do have a lot of fossil plants already around.
Short answer: no, they are not (read footnotes 1 and 2)
CAISO, 1st column, 1st bar:
- blue is the cost of solar
- beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas
CAISO, 2nd column, 1st bar:
- blue is the cost of solar+battery (max 4 hours)
- beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas
Using batteries improves the ELCC (contribution to meet peak demand), but it is not enough, so it has to be compensated somehow. Want to get a higher ELCC? Get a larger battery (and install more solar panels). Be aware, this is not a linear relationship: getting from 10 % to 20 % of renewables is cheaper than getting from 70 % to 80 % (this is why the costs are lower when the penetration rate shown in the slide is low). You reach a point where you just waste energy or need to pay to use it, like in Germany, Netherlands or Denmark.
There is no best energy source. There are different networks, energy mixes, needs, etc. Under CAISO, it is just more convenient to go with nuclear. Under SPP, solar has a very high ELCC and a very low penetration, which makes it convenient just to install solar, but up to which percentage?
Overall, some mix of renewables and nuclear, depending on the network, seems a reasonable solution. Otherwise we would need to go with fossil power plants to meet the remaining demand (carbon capture seems wishful thinking) or to over provision renewables while building incredibly large storage systems (be aware that there are places where fluctuation are not on a daily or weekly basis, but on a seasonal basis - good luck storing the energy for ~3 months using lithium ion batteries because you live in a polar region).
The book "How to avoid a climate disaster" (Bill Gates) has a chapter just for that. I would recommend it.
The amount of debt is not directly correlated to the health of a company: most companies have debts, and building nuclear reactors is very capital intensive.
EDF net income for 2023 is 10B €, while for H1 2024 is 7B €. From 2007 to 2024 always had a positive net worth except for 2022.
France is a net-exporter, with cheap, reliable and low emission electricity. Germany is almost the opposite of that.
Of course it has debt, as almost every company and state :)
EDF got loans from banks and money on the market, based on the fact that investors thinks it is a good investment. That is economics 101 and holds true for all publicly traded companies. The numbers are freely available on the internet, as prescribed by the law for all companies listed.
The debt also went down in 2023. It is worth to remember that EDF is forced by the French government to sell cheap energy, below market price, to protect consumers from rising energy prices (caused by the high reliance of other countries on natural gas from Russia - like Germany that phased-out nuclear in the meanwhile).
Nuclear is also treated differently from renewables when it comes down to low-emission investments by the various EU investment funds, and cannot compete in bidding rounds together with renewables (which drives the prices up, as there is way more demand than offer, so it makes no sense to compete). If the EU commission decides that there should be technological neutrality on low-emission power plants, EDF would be in a quite good position.
If you are so sure that EDF will not be able to finance its debt or build new reactors, you can bet against it by short it and, if your analysis is correct, make quite some money.
"There’s a new tool in systemd, called “run0”. Or actually, it’s not a new tool, it’s actually the long-existing tool “systemd-run”, but when invoked under the “run0” name (via a symlink)".
systemd-run is very useful to run tasks with specific cgroups settings, or at a specific time. It asks for password whenever needed.
"We haven’t opened ordering in your region yet, but we’re looking forward to getting there!"
This is definitely illegal inside the European Economic Area, but I guess they are not aware of that. It is allowed not to ship to a specific area in some cases, but not refuse to sell entirely based on the country.
If there is someone from Framework Computer Inc. reading this message: you do not need to comply with any local law if you are not targeting a specific country inside the European Economic Area; you just need to follow the EU rules. Therefore, it does not make any sense to prevent people from a specific EEA country to buy your products (and that is illegal as well). Please fix it! :)
See the KB article[1]. You’re supposed to find a freight forwarder in a EU country that they “support”, select that as your country and ship there (and thence wherever you actually want to). The only allowance is that they will deign to not actively decline your payment or cancel your order if you pay with a credit card from another EU country (unlike everywhere else in the “unsupported” world[2]). I guess that’s probably legal?..
(I don’t know if they actually mean EEA when they say EU, or if they actually mean EU. That may be important given you’re in Norway.)
Thanks for the links :)
They should use EU/EEA actually, since the very same rule apply to the whole EEA. Given what they have written, I guess they would be glad to amend the page.
It remembers me when I pasted a multiline SQL query started with `begin;`, but psql ignored the first due to a connection timeout, it automatically reconnected to the server, and proceeded to execute the following lines...
etcetera is found in ~500 years old books, and et cetera itself comes from et caetera, from the Greek καὶ τὰ ἕτερα. Which one should we use then? Should we only use the Latin from 1 BCE/CE or the vulgar Latin that evolved after? :-)
Maybe I do not feel it like a big issue, since many Latin languages use it a single word (such as Italian with eccetera, Spanish, Portuguese), due to the evolution of the language.
